The Boat of the Dead

In which I am going down a long, dark river

During a month in Livingston, Montana, I’ve managed to make my way through 18 of my 136 Moleskines. It’s exhausting, encountering so many different—and often batshit-crazy—versions of whoever the hell I am. I’ve been skipping around chronologically, and in the process have encountered more darkness than I am as yet comfortable sharing, but every single one of those little colored Post-It tabs represents some attempt to say something important (to me) about the world and my place in it. The whole enterprise is channel-surfing on a gargantuan scale, and any cohesive version of my identity or what I’ve tried to think of as my place in the world remains maddeningly elusive.

This entry, from July of 2010 is characteristic of my lifelong struggles to find or follow a plot.

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Black Book 69, July 10-12, 2010

I’m on my way to the moon on every page. (Nina Michelson, Silence and Music)

Coding static. I aspire to a certain guitar sound, played by words, and after more than 30 years I still can’t find the tone.

Drunk on the sidewalk of my old hometown: “When you’re truly the Forgotten Man, people don’t even say, ‘Here comes the Forgotten Man.’”

Presumably the big picture is very big indeed.

All these poor fools trying to blaze trails right down the middle of an interstate highway.

I have been exploited by the impossible. (from Pessoa)

I burned some bridges, or had them burned for me. Something my father had warned me I should never do. You never know, he said, when you might need something on the other side of that river.

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Every day for many years after her son’s death—she would never, she knew, be able to refer to it as a suicide—she had gone through the help wanted and personal ads in the local newspaper, clipping out job postings and the profiles and entreaties of women in her son’s age range that she thought might be ideal matches. She pasted these things into a scrapbook.

She pasted other things as well. Marriage announcements, for instance, where the young man had some small resemblance to her son as he had looked when he was still alive, and as he might have looked in five years, or ten years. She read an article about a woman who created computerized aging portraits of children and young people who had gone missing, and hired her to create versions of her son at thirty, forty, and fifty. She was pleased that in each portrait, ‘the subject’ (as the woman had insisted on referring to her son) remained handsome and almost boyish.

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There are all manner of repugnant conclusions, sir, most of which utterly confound logic or philosophy or faith, despite which they remain, conclusively, irrefutable conclusions.

3:15 a.m., after sitting with my head literally in my hands, trying to remember something that occurred to me as I was walking my dog earlier in the day: Yes! Finally! The Library of Laughter. A vast archive, starting with friends and family, and gradually moving out into neighborhoods and communities, recording and cataloging individual laughs, so that some elderly person could someday sit down in a library or museum, punch the appropriate buttons on a console, and hear the sounds of her entire family once again laughing together.

I don’t need any new ideas. I just need to remember my old ones.

Shouldn’t someone have long ago done something to put some linguistic distance between ‘hole’ and ‘whole’?

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What I love about photographs: Everyone is alive, except for the startling occasions when a photograph shows us what death really looks like.

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Where I’m from the old gals would get roaring drunk right alongside the fellows, and nobody batted an eye. That’s not strictly true, of course; I’m sure there were plenty of people in town who looked down their noses at what they saw as the whole sorry lot, but mainly from the crabbed and hobbled vantage of gossip.

The church goers and tee-totalers weren’t likely, of course, to haunt the bars and servicemen’s clubs. They were from different worlds, and though I’d never truly felt like I belonged to either of them, when proximity forced an allegiance I was from an early age predisposed to side with the drinkers.

It was still my hometown, even though I’d left there at the first opportunity and believed at the time that I’d quit the place for good. I was wrong about that, however, and Thomas Wolfe’s old claim might have been true in a strictly Heraclitean sense—it would never be quite the same town I would return to, but in terms of unbreakable affections and associations it would nonetheless be the only real home I’d probably ever know. Time couldn’t sever the old bonds and obligations, and I returned there oftener as I settled into middle age and the formal community rituals that sustained genuine communal interdependence became more commonplace: Weddings, initially, and family reunions; then high school graduations, wedding anniversaries, and, finally, funerals.

I’d entered the stage of my life where most of my return trips involved the latter, but given the hardscrabble nature of the place, even these didn’t regularly conform to any traditional sense of the natural order of things.

In my 48th year I returned home for four funerals: an old friend of my deceased father, a beloved former teacher, a childhood friend (a suicide), and the 18-year-old son of another dear friend, who lost his boy in a car accident one month after seeing him, against long odds, graduate from high school.

For the most part the people I’d grown up with didn’t really know how to properly mourn, and so three of these four funerals got the religious formalities out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible and then broke down—or up—into drunken, protracted parties that were virtually indistinguishable from the wedding receptions I’d routinely attended in earlier decades.

The party for the dead boy dragged on long into the night, or into the early morning hours. The music got progressively louder. People eventually began to dance with abandon, and the liquor continued to flow. A large bonfire grew ever larger as the party raged on. I honestly never sensed anything lugubrious or pathetic about the affair. The guests were celebrating a life, and life in general, in the only way they knew how.

When I finally excused myself it was after three in the morning, and I sought out the father of the dead boy. I had known this man most of my life. He was laughing loudly when I found him, and as I told him goodbye I instinctively said to him, “I’m so sorry.” We were embracing as I said this, and he gripped me tighter, thumped my back reassuringly several times, and said with a wholly convincing absence of grief, “Oh, he’s not dead. We’re his people, and he’ll be alive as long as we’ve still got the breath to tell stories. If you’d stuck around this town you’d have learned by now that nobody ever dies here. This is the land of the living.”